Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Month: April 2021

  • Reflecting on deeper work

    At the end of the day the weekend will be here. This writing endeavor got off to a slow start today. I’m still feeling rather sleepy for some reason. Even two shots of espresso from my trusty Nespresso machine have not kickstarted the day. Right now I’m using Google Keep to collect notes on things that need more coverage or I should go back and review. My new strategy is to flip the Google Keep cards to green after they have been revisited as part of this grand daily writing project. That helps me at least have some record/memory of what was included and what was not included. One of the drawbacks of writing this early in the morning is that the things that come to mind are not always on the forefront of my thoughts later in the day. When you get into the pattern of blocking and tackling the tasks that come in throughout the day it is much harder to think strategically and deeply about the form, function, structure, and assumptions (FFSA) of complex things. I know that you have to make the time for that type of analysis and review at various points in the day, but sometimes the stream of things happening prevents that type of deeper work. 

    This weekend I should have a few blocks of time in the morning to really focus in and work on some things to move them forward. One of the things that has to receive some attention is the week 15 edition of The Lindahl Letter for Substack publication. My efforts to stay ahead of publication have fallen behind and the letter is about to go real time as of Saturday. That has good and bad points. It would probably be in my best interest to work ahead a little bit this weekend and try to draft content for the next 5 weeks, but that might not happen. I just might end up working real time and refining the post each work as it is being written. Part of this 52 week writing effort is to really focus deeply on machine learning and dig into practical applications. That is part of what being a pracademic is all about. In this case it would be about studying applied machine learning in the wild and in academic journals. A responsible academic working from a pracademic mindset would probably translate that into publications. In my case, I’m gearing up to do that as an outcome of the year long research and writing effort. I’m viewing it as a project designed to gain and share knowledge along the way and ultimately refine that into some type of academic article or articles.

  • That grinding sting of rework

    Self censorship can create a sense of hesitation to publish or even cause people to suppress content entirely. Writing a page of prose and giving it one quick editorial review is all that happens before I click publish each day. That is pretty much it. Things boil down to a three step process: 1) write it, 2) read it, and 3) publish it. That is one of the things that my morning writing routine reinforces. Really trusting my ability to create content and stay focused drives that process forward each day. Getting passed the grinding sting of self censorship can be a very difficult process. In this case, you have to both be confident in your ability to produce prose and in your ability to edit it and publish in one quick pass. Most of the content you read here on this weblog is just lightly edited before publication. I check for blatant things, but nothing gets a ton of rework, editing, or revision. This is mostly about the act of being creative and thinking out loud within the confines of the written word. My efforts in the moment are locked into the process of writing and I slowly work from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. I have been doing that and not letting go of that process until it is complete for the last 10 days or so each morning. That is the key to getting into the habit of starting the day by writing. 

    All right, I have to admit that a couple of sentences just got deleted, but they were a false start. They just had to go and things needed to move on from that derivative nonsense. I don’t consider trimming out a couple sentences of a false start to be an act of self censorship; it is really just a bit of editing in the moment. You have probably been writing and produced a sentence that just did not work and either needed to be rewritten or had to vanish from the screen and forever be banished to the scrapheap. Strangely enough I’m not sure if that act of hitting delete really needed three sentences of coverage today, but that happened and it is where my thoughts in the moment focused. During that whole time the music selection algorithm of my Pandora station was streaming really well picked songs. Sometimes that algorithm really strings together songs in a well matched series. Other times it is all over the place, but today was one of those days where it worked remarkably well. Compared to the quality of my prose today the streaming algorithm is winning the quality output battle. 

    My screen just exited the Windows 10 night light mode. Apparently, daybreak was 06:05 hours this morning. That feature really is rather useful and appreciated. Earlier this week I took a little bit of video while waiting in a parking lot of a rainstorm. Initially I was just trying to capture the audio of the really heavy rain from inside the car. Yesterday I used a photo that was taken looking out from the sunroof into the falling rain as the featured image. It was one of those rare photos that when you look back at it you think that it could very well be a desktop wallpaper. Every year I probably take two or three photographs that could be a Windows desktop background. This photograph is one I might just try to add to that service as an option. Right now my desktop background is set to an image of Tony Stark in the background and Iron Man in the foreground. It is probably from when the Avenger’s Endgame movie came out. I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the desktop background image. Most of the time I have two things open each taking up half of the screen divided vertically. Later today I’ll see how hard it is to upload things to the Microsoft desktop and let you know how that process went.

  • All those notes and ideas

    Some of my notes over in Google Keep have suggestions for where to take my writing this morning. Throughout the day I capture a few notes now and again that are aimed at sparking a writing adventure at a later date. They are just little nuggets of ideas, but they are rarely drawn out into a full sketch of what could be produced. A long time ago (over twenty years), I used to have a proper idea notebook where I would sketch out ideas before putting them down on paper. For better or worse that idea notebook went everywhere with me and all sorts of things were jotted down for later. At this very moment, I think that notebook is sitting in a pile of retired and slowly aging notebooks in my office. Actually at this very moment they are sitting behind me in the bottom drawer of a cabinet. It could be a somewhat frightening exercise to grab that idea notebook and review it now with the power of twenty more years of life’s lessons, wisdom, and hindsight. Some of those nuggets of an idea that were taken down by hand on page might be interesting. I’m going to venture to guess that a good number of those ideas are about the nature of normativity and the contempt the social animal has for the social fabric. The rest of them are about the opposition the thinker would have to have to that as a juxtaposition or opposite reflection. 

    Right now I’m resisting the urge to turn my chair around and start to dig into the ideas of the past. That resistance is allowing me to begin to really think and write with my Google Doc window taking up the whole screen. My chair is comfortably positioned and I’m in a good place to write for about 30 more minutes, but we will see how it goes. Being interrupted in the middle of my writing projects always is so disruptive. When you really focus and get into the moment where your full capacity of thought and emotion is targeted at the act of writing something happens. You let everything else sort of fade away and the moment is yours to take in any direction you want to go one keystroke at a time. Sometimes my thoughts even wonder in the middle of typing as the act of entering actual keystrokes is much slower than my ability to sort of create out loud from the inner voice of narration. I hope that sort of captures it in a nutshell. At the point of meditation taking hold you can feel a sort of zero space where nothing is pulling or pushing you in any direction. In that moment is where I like to allow my thoughts to form around what will get put onto the page. That is the space where I attempt to do my deepest thinking. This is a very different effort from the tactical process of problem solving. 

    This post was almost titled, “a history of notes and ideas.” However, the current title of the post won out today. It seemed like the right way to go in the moment. Something in the background took me out of my writing flow for just a second and my thoughts scattered. Recovering from that moment of chaos in a stream of creativity takes a lot of energy and focus. Part of this daily writing project is the commitment to sitting down and filling up a page of prose in one writing session from start to finish. Starting the day off with a solid 500+ word writing session is really a good way to open up the day to more possible paths forward. In some ways it helps me focus my thoughts and really refine where my energy and focus are going to be placed. Generally anything that is really on my mind during this time will proceed to the forefront of my thoughts and receive attention. Inherent within that previous statement is probably the nexus of why this exercise is valuable. All of the content that is outputted is probably less important to me at the moment than the clarity and focus that are achieved through the process of writing.

  • Working along and some meditation

    My renewed daily writing project seems to be going well enough. Each morning I’m sitting down in front of my main computer to create a page of prose. That computer was recently moved into a Be Quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 revision 2 case. It is way quieter than the previous one. My typing has been happening on this Corsair K65 mechanical keyboard. It is way louder than my previous one. It has been a long time since I spent a good amount of time with a mechanical keyboard. The only real sound in my office outside of music is the sound of this keyboard and it is a triumphant clickety clacking of productivity. Seriously typing on a mechanical keyboard is much louder than I remember. My office is really just me and some computer so the loudness of the keyboard is not a problem, but it is a new part of the process. It is interesting to get acclimated to working on the right side of a split screen 38 inch monitor. I have resisted moving the Google Doc window to the center of the screen so far, but that would be the more natural way to go about the process of writing at a desk with a keyboard. Having the content straight ahead would be reasonable and an easier way to work vs. always looking to the right. Maybe I’ll give that a shot this morning to see how it goes. My writing this morning has been very tactical and has not transitioned into a higher level of observation and reflection. 

    Today might be one of those days where a higher level of observation and reflection is not going to happen. Things today started very slowly from the moment consciousness of the outside world occurred. Maybe this is one of those days where a bit of meditation and mindfulness might help refocus my energy and effort on more productive things. It is entirely possible that jamming along to a record on my guitar is about to happen. Getting deeply lost in the process of playing music can be just as calming as all out meditation for me these days. It is also a lot easier for me to relax into the mode of playing guitar without thinking vs. trying to relax to the point of zero space. This post is not really about the merits or practices of meditation. That could have been an interesting topic to tackle. Maybe later it will receive the attention it deserves. Part of that would be about getting to a head space where envisioning a path of stones running through a stream would be possible. Each stone in the stream reflects a step and a choice driving things forward to that perfect possible future. Moving from being like water and going with the flow to willfully making a choice to step from stone to stone in that grand flowing river of time would be at the heart of that meditation. 

    Pure stream of consciousness writing can go wherever your thoughts take you. I find the best time to engage in that practice of writing to be right when I wake up at the start of the day. Sometimes at the very end of the day I can also deeply focus on that writing practice. This weblog has been full of stream of consciousness based writing for years. Most of that writing is now reserved into a private section, but new prose is now being generated daily and oddly enough being automatically shared as a Twitter thread. For the most part that Twitter thread feature appears not to really do anything besides place the content of the weblog post on Twitter where it occurs as a thing in the stream just long enough for something else to show up. Within the aggregate the Twitter feed is a never ending stream of the public square come to virtual life in a completely unmanageable sea of utterances. Nobody could sort it all out or review even a single day of the total Twitter stream at this point. Like most of the digital feeds these days the amount of content being generated greatly outpaces our ability to consume them or even acknowledge that they exist.

  • Beyond the structures and forms

    Today is going to be filled with potential options to do something useful. It is going to be one of those days where more paths are open than choices can be made to take. This happens from time to time and picking the right ones is essential to maximizing the potential of the day. Sure one path exists where the perfect possible future is realized, but that dance is sometimes beyond the structures and forms we follow will allow. Maybe that is the quintessential problem we face and need to spend time solving. It is a very real challenge to figure out how to get things done and done well within the structures and forms we have available. We also face a very real implied normativity that directs convention in what could be described as the forms. Those two things working together constrain a possible set of paths forward. I could elect at this point to spend the rest of the day doing nothing but studying applied cryptography, but consequences would exist to that decision. The output of that study and effort would be unlikely to outweigh the consequences. 

    My thoughts at the moment are at least more focused on the edge of what is possible than tactical questions. In terms of all the ways the start of the day could have gone this path is much better than the alternative. Now we can round out that first thought into a question of action. Aligning to a path that strives toward the perfect possible future. At this junction in the inquiry, I am thinking about the common purpose of advancing both my own intellectual pursuits and strengthening the fabric of civil society. Both of those things are in my own self interest, but they are generally silos of action compared to each other. We exist within the moment of reflection as we take action. Each step forward, to the side, or backward is a reflection of a choice made in that moment. We have a space of reflection that can be used to consider and reflect or to drive action. Making a very conscious decision to use that space of reflection to drive toward a purpose like striving toward a perfect possible future is one way to sharpen action. Inside of that contemplation is inherently a choice to action. Retreating like a turtle into itself rarely is the action that moves things forward. I suppose some very special cases of an action paradox exist where standing still makes the most sense. Even the notion of waiting a turn for an outside action to complete seems more reasonable than the turtle’s defensive withdrawal. 

    Action at its very nature and paths forward have been considered and the day is still beginning. Maybe today is the day that the right first step is followed by enough reasonably correct steps that a continuity of action builds toward something meaningful. That is an entirely plausible thought at the moment and that is inherently exciting if not thrilling as a way to start the day. These are the complex ideas we have to consider during this grand chautauqua of existence. Within that moment of reflection the structures of our institutions provide guard rails toward certain outcomes. Several days of work are the basic project we see enumerated as the expected outcome of a week. We see that day of work as being the basic unit of complexly interconnected communities. Maybe the summation of that is a bit harder to compel to exist in written form, but the idea is on the edge of what is possible. Describing the grand interconnected nature of economy and intergenerational equity remains a valid pursuit. That is probably where we need to wrap up this course of the chautauqua. More will come as the series of learning never stops from one day to the next.

  • Sunday writing and donuts

    Yesterday during the course of looking around the WordPress/Jetpack settings, I switched out some of the ordering on my WordPress widgets. Now on the right side of the page the recent posts are showing up at the top even on the home page. That is a new change in direction given the previous deprotization of weblog posts on 2/19/2021. Now I’m about to hit a new 10 day WordPress publishing streak of weblog posts. That little bit of content had to wait until after donuts were procured. I was going to set the featured image to a quality close up shot of my donuts, but one of them is now gone forever. A solution to this problem became apparent. I grabbed a different donut from the box for a brief photography session using the Night Sight feature on my Google Pixel 5 smartphone. Two photos were taken and one was much better than the other in terms of where the image focus selection centered. The Twitter thread feature will probably grab that donut image and feature it. 

    During my review of all the settings on WordPress and Jetpack I learned a little bit more about weblogs, but for the most part nothing had really changed. Part of getting back into the swing of daily weblog posting is about being curious and thinking about things in a deeper way. Part of that process involves digging into things that are just a part of my daily journey. Sometimes you just have to look at things a little bit differently and that little change in perspective can help make that happen. My thoughts at the moment are a little more reserved for some reason. I’m really taking a tactical approach to writing at the moment. In the last twenty minutes or so I have written about writing, weblog settings, donuts, and perspective and the day has not even really started. That is not a bad start to the day, but it still feels like something better is on the horizon. I’m hunting for the perfect possible future and these two paragraphs are not emblematic of that. 

    Both of the donuts are now gone; they were consumed with near reckless abandon. Two shots of espresso were slowly followed by a cup of coffee. This should be the moment when words flow onto the screen. Instead my thoughts are wondering from the task at hand to where I could buy Dune (Arrakis/Rakis) spice coffee mixes. I found a few recipes to make my own, but no professionally packaged mixes for my future cups of coffee. Maybe with the new movie coming out at some point they will make an officially licensed spice mix for coffee. I’m not sure they could compel me to buy an instant coffee mix, but something that was added to coffee from a shaker would be welcomed. That is oddly specific, but that is how it goes in terms of my thoughts on the subject at the moment. Maybe in an hour or so I’ll try to write something with a higher intellectual density.

  • Thinking about writing and research

    Well my testing of the Twitter thread creation feature in WordPress has gone well enough. I have used it for the last couple of days and the results were successful, but not in any way inspiring. The linking method they use to bring links from the post over to Twitter is wonky. They mechanically extract the link and share it explicitly within parentheses after the original spot where it occurred. So it looks sort of out of place based on the way people share links in a modern embedded way on the internet. It’s an odd style choice, but then again Twitter itself is a forced minimum in a world of excess and overcommunication. Even the new expanded Tweet limit of 280 characters just allows a couple of sentences to be created at a time. You can elect to communicate within that shortened utterance window, but it is not really how I prefer to exchange my thoughts and ideas.

    My preference is to engage in a more long form exchange of the written word. That is probably why writing academic articles and weblog posts is where I spend a lot of my time. For the most part either way you are granted the chance to put your thoughts, arguments, opinions, or logic down on the page for better or worse. Sure in the academic writing space you can face delays and rounds of revisions, but that is the nature of things so ingrained in the academy that it took an entirely new method of online pre-print sharing to shatter. That happened due to the fact that people want to openly exchange academic information and learn and develop rapidly in certain segments of the academy. That need to exchange and work toward common frameworks and applications of developing technology required a faster cycle of information exchange. Generally in the machine learning space, artificial intelligence domain, and other sciences it seems that publication in arXiv has been working for people. It is a far less gated way to get your words out into the open vs. waiting for the academic review process of some journals that take an awfully long time to evaluate content. 

    A lot of research seems to be starting to form around the way pre-print sharing is changing the very nature of publishing in journals. I’ll provide more coverage of that later when I find an article worth sharing that concisely explains the current situation. That is probably a problem for more than one cup of coffee to solve. I’m only partially into my first cup of coffee and it is only slightly warm at the moment. Microwaving that cup of coffee seems like a lot of work at the moment. I’ll probably muddle on through creating the rest of this page of prose before going to work on the coffee problem. My initial goal for the day was to sit down and write a full page before switching over to editing and finishing the next installment of The Lindahl Letter for Friday, April 30, 2021. During the course of designing the trajectory of that writing effort 37 weeks were mapped out and content was drafted, reworked, and established for the first 14 weeks of publication. As of next Friday we will have traveled to the end of my generally drafted efforts. Starting in week 15 will be entering a new phase of publication on Friday and new content creation for the next week starting on Saturday. It will basically be a weekly content creation and publishing cycle going forward.

    It is entirely possible that a flourish of creativity will occur and enough content will be drafted to work ahead again, but that does not appear to be the case the moment. Things seem to be lining up to a weekly content creation cycle. That is not a bad path forward, but it requires a lot more consistency in weekly writing than being weeks ahead of the point of publication. Generally the amount of tinkering and rework is about to decrease.

  • A little bit of daily writing

    For the last two days of posting on this weblog the content has been sent over to Twitter as a thread (aka Tweet storm). It still feels like the handling of threads by the Twitter application/website is somewhat interesting in practice. You can end up seeing or looking at the middle or end of a thread and the end user sort of has to decide to view the thread in totality. It does show some indicators that you should click on the very happy “Show this thread” indicator at the bottom of any Tweet, but it seems rather shoehorned to fit or an artifact of after the fact design. Naturally, I’m going to keep going down this road for at least the next few posts to really get a feel for how the feature really works out in the wild. Neither of the Tweet threads sent any traffic back to the weblog, but the WordPress reader did send over a few readers who were probably interested in my thoughts on automation. That is a topic that is definitely worthy of consideration. 

    My efforts to return to the habit of daily writing at the start of the day are working out well enough. It all starts with waking up early enough to get things done without anybody else in the house moving around. That is probably why the time at night and the time at the start of the day are the best use cases for producing epic tomes of lofty weight and meaning. It certainly takes a bit of energy to engage in the active practice of reflection along the way. I have a path that involves dedicating a few steps forward every day to achieve, but the actions and tasks between those steps are the stuff that defines my productivity. Both a day and a stone stand the test of time. I’m probably not going to do any stone working so my aim has to be to make the most of the time comprising my day. That is what sitting down and wrestling with the blank page is all about. It is about creating prose from the top to the bottom of the page and realizing the journey of doing that unfolds a world of through experiments that otherwise would have gone without the spark to create them. That is really the natural output of conducting this type of writing output on a daily basis. The goal of the process is to create the opportunity for something interesting to spring into existence.

    Experiments: 1) For this post I set a featured image to see what it would do to the Twitter thread. 2) I also included a link to Twitter in the second sentence to see how it handles external links in the thread process.

  • Thinking about that automation

    My first weblog to tweet storm automation went well enough. It did not translate to any new weblog traffic of any kind, but it was sort of fun to see the post get broken up via automation and sent out a series of linked tweets in thread form. For the most part this went like most tweets it was nothing more than an utterance in the grand public commons that went without notice or observation. It happened and that is about all that needs to be said about it at this time. I’m going to keep using this method to post content and see how it goes for the next few days. It does require a little bit more work at the time of posting, but it is sort of fun to see it populate the tweets at the time of publication. It is interesting how much automation is being built out to cross post and to share content across a multitude of platforms. It is probably an artifact of the thinning level of attention each application or forum has within the grand context of the public mind. In the aggregate the attention of the people has been diluted to a point where getting a message out to the vast majority of people is actually really difficult to achieve in practice. To that end the use of automation to reshare and send content flying from platform to platform is probably going to only increase the level of dilution as the sharing increases in velocity. 

    One of the things that I truly fear is that models like GPT-3 and others will be used to create so much content within the stream that everything else will be drowned out. It is entirely possible that the classical method of news reporting could be overwhelmed by bad actors using a firehouse of near real content created by GPT-3 to simply make finding the signal within the noise an impossible act. That is a fear shared by other NLP and machine learning researchers who know that the use of language models to turn out endless streams of content could overwhelm our current channels of communication. That thought should probably end up in a Substack newsletter instead of a weblog post, but I’m still struggling with the mechanics of doing both of those things at the same time. Sometimes my start of the day writing sessions are going to be more geared toward that type of content instead of pure stream of consciousness. It is entirely possible that my thoughts of the moment will drift into the production of more technical and content driven areas. When you go where your whims will take you it could be toward more academic writing or it could be toward the passions of the moment. That is the nature of that type of writing effort. 

    I am still sitting down and trying to fill up one blank page of content in the morning at the very start of the day. It is pretty easy to just open up Google Docs and start writing from the top of the document and watch the content fill up the screen. I did end up getting a Kensington Duo Gel Keyboard Wrist Rest to go with my 60% size K65 Corsair mechanical keyboard. Typing for a long stretch without the wrist pad was not very comfortable and just adding the gel wrist rest was enough to make things feel much more comfortable when typing. That probably has something to do with ergonomics and the mechanics of proper tying, but my explanation is grounded in the practice of knowing one way was uncomfortable and the other allows me to type for longer stretches of time. This post will go online here shortly, but it needs to be read and revised before that happens. The word count on this batch of prose is well over 500 so it was a good start to my planned daily writing activities.

  • Setting up a bit of automation

    Well I have moved back into the pattern of writing a daily weblog post. Each morning I’m sitting down and producing a few words in a near stream of consciousness fashion. This is in addition to my efforts on Substack each week. Along the way, it seemed like a good idea to update my “Publicize posts” setting to create links from Twitter to automatically share new weblog posts by title and a link when they are published. Oddly enough they have a new setting since the last time that I used that functionality. Apparently, I can set up each post to compile and publish as a thread on Twitter, “Twitter Thread: Share the content of this post as a Twitter thread.” I’m kind of curious what it does with multiple photos in the same post. I’m wondering if it just posts text or if links, images, or embedded videos will be compiled over. Some of the documentation says that it will bring over all the content. That is something that I will have to test out by embedding images and maybe some links or something to this post.

    I ate the pretzel in this photo. It was delicious. I’m curious how it will show up in the Tweet thread. Right after this line of text is a photo of a giant pretzel with a cup of cheese and a cup of red sauce.

    The pretzel was delivered with this extra large New York style cheese pizza. Right after this line of text is a slightly off to the right picture of that pizza.

    Here is the output of what happened after publication. It made a thread of Tweets, but the images did not carry over it sort of just compressed the content into a series of linked Tweets.

    https://twitter.com/nelslindahl/status/1384857515028926464